Earth has 370 quintillion gallons of water – but only 0.01% of that is freshwater that we can use. As climate change alters the global water cycle, this precious resource is in danger of becoming even more scarce.
Your challenge is to create a visual tool to help students better understand the complete path of water across the entire Earth system and how the availability of this critical resource is affected by our changing climate.
BACKGROUND
Water is life, and yet demand for freshwater resources is far outpacing supply. Already, roughly half of the world’s population is experiencing severe water scarcity for at least part of the year. Warming global temperatures threaten to reduce freshwater availability even further, which could impact essential resources like drinking water and critical infrastructure such as agriculture, industry, and more. Data from NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM), Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO), and Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) missions can increase our understanding of how freshwater resources are changing over time and this information can help communities make better decisions about how to protect this vital resource. From the global down to the local perspective, NASA data can help tell this story in a unique way, and provide students with clear evidence of the ways climate change is impacting our world.
OBJECTIVES
Your challenge is to create a compelling visual tool that uses data from NASA satellites to help elementary, middle, or high school students better understand the complete path of water across the entire Earth system and how the availability of this critical resource is affected by our changing climate. You can tell this story from the global perspective, zoom in on specific regions, or even show the impacts on a particular community. You can also tell the story in a variety of ways, from a single data visualization to a series of infographics based on real mission data – or something more creative!
Think about how your tool can illustrate the complete path of water through the Earth system, including its origin in the ocean, how it travels through the atmosphere, sinks on land, and how it is used and recycled before returning to the ocean. How will you explain and depict the processes in the water supply-demand chain, and how they change under the influence of planetary warming (e.g., intensification of hydroclimatic extremes, uneven distribution of freshwater resources on land, over/under supply of moisture from the ocean causing flood/drought events, and other deviations from the norms in the global water cycle)?
You could make an app, a game, tell an interactive story, or develop some other kind of tool to educate your audience about the global water cycle and climate change. Don’t forget to take advantage of NASA assets to tell the stories about water. For example, you could explain water storage and distribution with information from SWOT, precipitation with GPM, soil moisture and salinity (as a proxy for evaporation) with SMAP, ground water with GRACE and GRACE-FO, etc.
Your tool could begin by visualizing and tracing ‘water paths’ through the Earth System, but whatever stories your tool depicts, they should be simple, straightforward, and clearly connected to the larger story of how climate change is affecting the water cycle. Importantly, don’t forget to keep your chosen primary audience of elementary, middle, or high school students in mind.
POTENTIAL CONSIDERATIONS
You may (but are not required to) consider the following:
Your target audience can include elementary, middle, or high school students—or students at multiple levels!
Your tool could:
Focus on compelling storytelling through data visualizations
Depict the impact of climate change
Show how human drivers (agriculture, industry, etc.) are impacting freshwater resources and climate change
Consider making your tool interactive
For data and resources related to this challenge, refer to the Resources tab at the top of the page. More resources may be added before the hackathon begins.